Harold Gene Lucas, 74 years old, was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday in Florida, 50 years after he fatally shot Jill Piper, a 16-year-old whose mother, now 86, witnessed the execution from the front row.
According to the agency Associated Press, Lucas was declared dead at 6:18 PM at Florida State Prison near Starke, after receiving a combination of three drugs. When asked if he wanted to say any last words, he simply replied, "No."
The crime occurred in August 1976 in Bonita Springs. Lucas, then 24 years old and Jill's ex-boyfriend, had been arrested days earlier for unlawfully entering the Piper family home.
On the day of the murder, both had two confrontations, and witnesses testified that Lucas threatened to kill her. Fearing for her safety, Jill asked her friends Richard Byrd Jr. and Terri Rice to stay with her that night.
Lucas arrived armed with a rifle and shot several times at the teenager while she pleaded for her life. He also injured her two friends, who survived. Jill died in the front yard of her parents' house.
Her brother Buck Piper was the one who found her mortally wounded that night.
"I tried to cradle her, you know? I just told her that I loved her and things like that," he recalled five decades later.
Lucas was sentenced to death in 1977. His sentence went through numerous appeals over the decades and was reviewed and reinstated several times.
After Governor Ron DeSantis signed his execution order, Lucas decided to waive the appeals he still had pending.
"I have been on death row for 50 years and I have no desire for this to continue. The sooner it ends, the better. I am tired," he said before a judge, according to court transcripts.
Jill's family occupied the front row during the execution. Among those present was her 86-year-old mother. Her father passed away before witnessing the carrying out of the sentence.
“I’m not sure if ‘closure’ is the right word. I think there’s a great sense of relief,” Buck stated after Lucas's death.
His younger brother, David Piper, also reacted to the protests against the execution that took place near the prison.
"One of the saddest parts of this whole story is that there are people who have their coffee and breakfast this morning and then go there to protest. That’s because it didn’t happen to them. It wasn’t their life that changed forever, but mine," she stated.
Lucas became the fourteenth inmate executed in Florida during 2026. The state has two more executions planned for September: Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72 years old, on the 10th, and Curtis Wilkie Beasley, 77, on the 29th.
Florida set a state record in 2025 with 19 executions since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In July of that year, it also became the first state to execute two inmates in a single day in nearly a decade.
For the Piper family, however, statistics take a backseat to a wait that began in 1976.
“She was a great lover of animals, a loving sister. She was the best friend I ever had,” Buck recalled about Jill, the teenager whose family waited half a century to see the sentence against her murderer fulfilled.
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